Behind the Bastards - Slavery, Mass Murder and the Birth of American Policing

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

Ever wonder how Policing started in the U.S.? In this episode, Robert and Prop trace the bloody birth of American policing, from Ancient Greece, to the slave-holding South, to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri today. FOOTNOTES: Myths and Realities of Crime and Justice A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing Slave Patrols: An Early Form of American Policing How the U.S. Got Its Police Force Slave Patrols The History of the Police The History of Policing in the United States Police Dog Bites Black Man A Look at Urban Violence & Police Brutality in Ancient Rome Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Outer space, a vast unknown frontier. We don't yet know the dangers that lurk beyond the stars, but unfortunately for Captain Sidney Owens and Jana Prescott, they're about to find out. Magmel from iHeart radio and Bamford productions. Listen to Magmel on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Police, a production of iHeart radio. Hello, everyone. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, which is normally a show about the worst people in all of history. And I guess it still is, but recent world events have compelled us to create a special miniseries behind the police, where we are going to be

giving a detailed history of American policing. All the good, the bad, and mostly the bad and the ugly. It's mostly bad and mostly ugly. And in order to help me give this story and tell it to the world, my guest today and for the next couple of weeks is Jason Petty, better known as Propaganda. Jason, you are a hip hop artist and a podcast host. And yeah, how are you doing, man? Hey, man, you know, West West and the world's on fire, but NASCAR stopped flying Confederate flags. So that's a thing, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, we're in a weird moment right now. I just like, like, snag a picture of 2020 and just, and like, send it to yourself in 2018 and go, what stupid director wrote this storyline? Yeah, it's, it's wild. And like, the wildest thing

about it is that I think we were all at this point of getting like just completely exhausted by like this constant parade of like bad news and like political malfeasance and like horrible things being done by people in power. And nobody was able to get on the same page about really anything. And then all of a sudden, you know, after the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd and that video came out for like the first time in a long time, almost everyone, like most people got broadly onto the same page. Like, I mean, we weren't even on the same page about a virus. Yeah, like it's like some, some that don't give no shits about what political stance you are going to kill you either way. We couldn't even agree on that. Yeah. But then this happened. I was like, we could

agree that Black Lives Matter for real. That's what we finally agree on. Yeah, it's good. Broadly good. Like I'm kind of, I'm recording this from outside of the, what will surely probably not exist by the time this airs, but was briefly the Seattle, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. I went to check that out for a couple of days. Yes, it's been wild. I wish you could talk to me a little more about like, there's got to be some sort of version of behind the bastards that's, that is the Northwest. Yeah. It's like, it's definitely a tale of two cities up there. Yeah. Yeah, I've been getting tear gassed in Portland for days and they were in Seattle too, but then they succeeded in getting their police to like pull out of a precinct, which is wild. And now the cops are back, so it

didn't last, but like, yeah. And you've been on the ground in Los Angeles, attending some of the protests if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. How have you felt about that? Dude, it's like, obviously the, the sheer volume, I mean, because I was here for the, you know, for the LA riots, you know what I'm saying? So the sheer volume of people, the amount of sustained energy has been like, maybe something's different, you know what I'm saying? The amount of diversity in the streets has been like, yo, maybe, I guess after having to like take it to the streets, since the, the day after Trump was elected, you know what I'm saying? From the women's march all the way to the school shootings, to the, to the climate, to the, like, there's no, to the, the damn Muslim ban. It's

just like, at some point we were just like, okay, enough is a damn enough. But like, to be fully transparent, I think I echo like the sounds of, of, of people who've been in like justice work for a while where like, your arms are still kind of folded on the side like, okay, you're gonna be here next week. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's like, you like this song, but you're gonna stay for the concert. Like this is a long concert. You feel me? Yeah. Yeah. It's a long, and I, I, I guess that's kind of why we're doing, you know, I, I, after like two weeks almost in the streets reporting on that, I kind of felt like the thing to do was to try to, um, because I guess it's, I think it's wrong to say that we're all on the same page. We're all reading the same book. And

the book is titled, uh, The Policer Murdering a Whole Ton of Black People, um, and also doing a bunch of other messed up stuff. And it feels like for a lot of folks, the first time they opened that book was because like, they, they went out to a protest and they got tear gassed and suddenly we're like confronted by the violence of American policing. Um, so I, I think now is a good time to go into a really deep history of American policing and let people know like where all this came from because this didn't, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's so, there's, I, and I, and I know what I love about your show is, is, I think why it reigned so true with me. It was like, it's this stuff that like we, we might be looking at the same dumpster fire, but I'm looking at it

with a hundred years of history to know like, I actually know what I'm looking at. You know what I'm saying? And like, y'all think I'm making this shit up. Like, I'm not, like, I swear to you, I'm not making this up. Like, yeah, just learn more and you'll stare at this dumpster fire like I am. Yeah. So let's stare at the dumpster fire. Um, and, and, and really just, yeah, I'll get into the story. Um, yes. As a side note, your camera is phenomenal. Like, what's up with this depth of feel on your, oh boy. That's great, man. It's like blurry in the back. Like, look at this thing, dude. Yeah. So people don't see all of my, uh, all of my, uh, illegal, uh, artwork that's on the walls behind me. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very erotic. Yeah. You see my bed here is where all the magic

happens. And by magic, I mean snoring and my daughter kicking me and my wife in our ribs. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I guess let's get into it. So, yeah, obviously, like, the idea of law, um, of there being laws that people could break and be punished, that's existed for a while. We all remember hearing about Hammurabi's code and stuff, like back in, back in school. Um, but throughout history, a surprising amount of societies, probably most of them have lacked anything that we would recognize as like a police force and like an organized and kind of a modern sense of the word. Like a lot of times you'd have like the, you know, you'd have a military that would enforce some rules for like the king or whoever,

but you didn't have like beat cops rolling around, you know, scanning neighborhoods. Now, the ancient Egyptians had something that might be seen as kind of a predecessor to the police. It was a small dedicated force regarding the tombs of the wealthy, uh, as well as their businesses, um, which will be something of a pattern throughout the, the episode here. Africa invents everything. Let's just go. That's the pattern. Anyway, go on. Including policing for the world. Including policing. Well, you can't, they can't all be winners. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not all writing. Yes. No. Um, so some ancient Greek city states, including Athens had what you might call a proto police force, um, as well. And in Athens,

this force was kind of geared towards protecting markets and keeping an eye on untrustworthy foreigners. So it was a little bit like, you know, a mix between normal police and ICE. Now this was not considered to be an honorable job. Uh, as historian PK Bailey noted in a 1928 lecture, quote, even in the enlightened democracy of Athens in the fifth century BC, no free citizen was prepared to serve in that capacity. And such police force as there was consisted of foreigners with the status of slaves who were the property of the States. In Greece, generally very few of the States seem to have made any provision at all so far as is known for the ordinary policing of their cities. Though the state of Sparta certainly had a very efficient system of secret police.

This is really interesting to me, especially because of what comes next. So yes, Sparta really seems to be like some of the first police that are very similar. You can draw a direct line from the Spartan secret police to the, the origins of American policing, which we're gonna, we're gonna get to in a little bit because the secret police of Sparta existed for one purpose and one purpose only. And it was to clamp down on any hint of rebellion from the vast majority of the nation's populace. See only about one in seven Spartans were like the guys from 300, right? That everybody knows like with the abs and the spears. The vast majority of the population were, were helots. They were slaves basically. They were, they were slaves. They

were just straight up slaves. Like it was a slave empire. Sparta was the vast majority of people in the country were slaves. And the Spartan like leadership and the Spartan like citizens spent all of their time terrified of slave rebellions. That's why the Spartan army didn't actually leave the country all that often because like they'd get up prison. Yeah. So they had all these slaves and they had to like clamp down on them. And they established a secret policing force called the Kryptea, which was made up of young men who had just finished the basics of their military training. So once a year, Sparta would elect a council of five E fours or leaders. And as part of a ritual, these E fours would begin their term by declaring war on the helot

population. They did this every year. Like every year we declare war on our slaves. So the, so the Spartans had Crips is what you telling me? They did. They did. Yeah. What are they called again? Kryptea. Yeah. The Crips. So they had Crips. So that was the boys in blue. I'm telling you, man, like this stuff has been going on for a long time. The other boys in blue. And it was trying to keep the slaves. They were trying to keep the slaves from rebelling. Everybody tucked that back in. Tuck that away for a second. Keep that in your head. Keep that in your head. So every year these elected leaders, you know, formally declare war on the helots. And it's something of like a ritual like to, and this ritual is based around like keeping them

from rebelling. So the Kryptea would be sent out to wander barefoot armed with knives into the countryside and they would seek out the strongest and the smartest of the helots, their slaves, and they would murder them in the night, calling the population of any potential leaders that like every year we go out, we find the smart ones and we kill them so that they can't rise up against us. How is this efficient? Y'all telling me this is the pinnacle of Western civilization. That's where all the Western civilization is trying to be. Okay. Got it. It does make it kind of appropriate when you could, a lot of American police officers wear like Spartan helmet patches now. It's like, yeah, okay. Little on the nose. Little on the nose, fellas. Yeah. Now I should

note here that there's actually, there is quite a lot of historical debate about the Kryptea. Some scholars agree with defining them as a secret police, as a force to keep the helots in line through regular murder. Victor Davis Hansen, who's a pretty prominent like pop historian, compares them to the Gestapo. But other historians will argue that the Kryptea were less of like a policing force and more of a guerrilla military unit, an auxiliary to the regular Spartan military that sort of also acted as kind of an advanced training program designed to blood new warriors by like giving them easy kills to help them get over any hesitation. They might have to do violence. And I don't think these two views are necessarily in conflict. The Kryptea seem to have been like a

dedicated guerrilla army meant to suppress dissent against the ruling class by doing violence to the impoverished majority who produced all of Spartan's value. In this, they fulfilled a role not very different from a lot of police forces in Western history. He can't make this stuff up, man. We can't make this up. It's pretty wild, man. I made myself today. I was like, okay, I'm gonna do a longer meditation. I'm gonna do some yoga. I am going to prepare myself for the amount of things you are going to tell me right now. And none of it worked because I still picked a fight with my wife today. It was like, I'm sorry, babe. We're about to talk about the ancient police, okay? So I'm sorry. And for the record, fuck the ancient police. You know what? You know what I'm saying? Ancient NWA,

like, you feel me? What are they called? The Roman Republic didn't have any kind of like formal national police force for most of its history. And Rome, which was like the biggest city in the ancient world, for most of, you know, the time that it was like kind of the center of the world, lacked anything that we would describe as like police. As Rome grew to become the largest city in, you know, its era, crime became an increasing problem. The wealthy were able to use vast networks of clients. Romans had this weird system whereby like, if you were rich, you gave money to a bunch of people who had less and they all had to like kind of have your back. Like everybody had a posse in ancient Rome. That's the way to look. Like every rich people had posse. Yeah,

everybody had like a big ass squad. And so the wealthy were able to use these big ass squads to like, you know, defend themselves from aggression and murder their political enemies, protect them in the streets and stuff. Meanwhile, organized criminals and gangs did basically the same thing. And there wasn't really a big difference between like the rich and their squads and like criminal gangs. They were kind of the same thing. Now victims of crimes had to either get revenge themselves or whip up a mob of their fellow citizens to help them in this task. There was a lot of whipping up of mobs in ancient Rome. Yeah. Why do I, I could just, it just makes, it just, it just tracks. Yeah. Like that just tracks so well, you know. Yeah, we've always been the same species. We

the same. We are the same. But one of the best, my history professor in college, one of the best thing he said to me was like, if you want to know what happened in history, think about what you would do. You know what I'm saying? It's just us then. What would you do? It's history is us, them. Yeah. And in ancient Rome, like the kind of graffiti networks they had really did act a lot like social media does to the extent that like kind of famous and powerful people would use like graffiti to get like shitloads, like to kind of do the same thing that like people who get pissed off online and have a following can do like, but with a literal mob as opposed to an online one. I'm going to literally cancel you ancient style. Yeah. I'm going to cancel you by having 400

dudes stab you repeatedly. We talked about the government. Like the government. It was just kind of everyone. Yeah. Seneca, a Roman philosopher in this period described street life in Rome this way. Some things will be thrown at you. Some will hit you. Which, you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rome's first emperor, Augustus, when like the whole Republic thing ended, he established what's generally recognized as the city's first police force. And it would be fairer to describe them as like a fire department that also did some policing. They were called the vigils and they stood watch at night and mainly kind of looked out for fires and attempted to stop the city from burning down because that was like a huge problem in Rome. Yeah. And the vigils

were armed, though, and they were drilled in a similar way to soldiers. You know, they used artillery to shoot dampening materials onto fires, but they also had the right to enforce laws and had the right to enter private homes to capture thieves, return runaway slaves and generally ensure order. So kind of like a fire department mixed with the police force. And this system didn't really spread widely throughout the Roman Empire, but broadly similar systems were established in a number of European cities intermittently over the centuries. The night watchman was kind of the most common way that this would this would wind up happening. And these were just, you know, in most of Europe, members of the community who like would rotate through the job of defending

their town or city from external threats like invaders and internal threats like fire. Their primary job was to give alarm to kind of get like everybody together so that they could deal with whatever problem, you know, happened in the night. And most of what we today would recognize as law enforcement was handled by citizens watching over their own communities. The English called this kin police, as it was generally seen as the responsibility of individual families to watch out for and police their family members, right? You know, there's not nothing centralized really in a lot of this period, you know, the middle ages and shit, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Yeah. So starting to get your kids. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like watch your people. Yeah. Hey man,

get your boy. Get your boy. Whose mans is this? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I love it. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. It kind of does. Yeah. So starting in the middle ages, like kind of the late middle ages, English communities began to develop something called the Frank pledge system. Now, this was a structure by which small groups of men could enforce the law in communities. And it was based around 10 man groups called tithings, which were themselves grouped into hundreds and then shires, which were similar to modern counties. So if you wondering where like the Lord of the Rings, why they call it the shire, that was like an old English word for a county. Yeah. Now, the person who was in charge. Yeah. Yeah. So the person who was in charge of all of the different

tithings, those 10 man groups in a shire was called the shire Reeve. And that's where the word sheriff comes from is like the head of this like shire, you know, kind of community protection group, the shire Reeve, the sheriff. And that's why the sheriffs run the county. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So that's where that comes back to. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. And so far we're like, this isn't something you can really like, obviously like the Spartan police is terrible, but like this makes sense. Like, yeah, you take care of your community. Like everybody kind of rotates through it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Hard to be angry at it. No. Individuals within tithings were expected to apprehend criminals and bring them to court and

shire Reeves oversaw their work. When Europeans began, you know, genociding and conquering North America, they brought variants of this system and other kind of similar systems developed in other parts of Europe with them. Policing in, you know, the colonies, which we're broadly referring to like mainly North America here. Like I'm not really, I don't have the time to like talk about like what went on in South America, like Central America. We're talking about like kind of the, particularly the English speaking colonies that started on the East Coast. Policing in those colonies fell into two broad categories known to historians as the watch and the big stick. And I'm going to quote next from a paper on the history of US policing by Dr. Gary Potter of Eastern

Kentucky University. Quote, the watch system was composed of community volunteers whose primary duty was to warn of impending danger. Boston created a night watch in 1636, New York in 1658, and Philadelphia in 1700. The night watch was not a particularly effective crime control device. Watchmen often slept or drank on duty. While the watch was theoretically voluntary, many volunteers were simply attempting to evade military service where conscripts forced into service by their town or performing watch duties as a form of punishment. And I have to say, again, last night I was kind of hanging out in the autonomous zone and I volunteered to do a shift on the night watch and I was definitely drinking.

Bro, you know, we look in the hood, you know, the pod we built is called hood politics. This is the pod I host. And one of the things is like, I just feel like, okay, no matter how unique our experience is, like you said, we're kind of, we're still all the same species, right? So when we talk about like neighborhood pigeons, right? I mean, if there's, there's, there's a, there's a misogynistic version of that. And then there's the other part that we would call the pigeon stool, which is like the guy who's supposed to sit at the edge of the street to make sure to see if the cops are coming. Yeah, right. So that's your pigeon stool, right? And he's drunk all the time. He's drunk and like falling asleep and it's just so normal. And the

hope is to do that because it's the easiest because it's odds are nobody coming. You know, so you could just sit over there and just kind of like, he's trying to holler at girls, like, you know, it is just, it just on the one off chance that the police actually come around. I mean, that's your life, but most of the time that's not going to happen. Yeah. Just sit there and drink and smoke and fight. Yeah. Yeah. Keep an eye on things, but not all that hard. Just make sure, just make sure mama not coming, you know? Yeah. So these kind of watch systems that started, you know, hitting, you know, the colonized northeast were more similar to the pseudo police system that you saw in ancient Athens than anything else. And, you know, kind of the,

the other side of this was the big stick system. And this was the first real example of for-profit policing. We're not going to go into tremendous detail about it in this episode. We're going to talk about it a lot more in our next episode, but I am going to give an overview here. So when we're talking about the colonies, we're talking about a very unregulated market for law enforcement in a lot of ways. You know, there's not an organized centralized police, but there are merchants who have a lot of property and those merchants want to make sure their property doesn't get stolen either when it's in transit or when it's in a shop. And so, you know, they have constables in these towns and constables are either appointed kind of in like a rotating

basis. So like you do your brief period of time as constable or you're elected to be constable. It was kind of, they did it a couple of different ways. And as a general rule, because constables weren't really paid, like they had to develop services that they would sort of sell to people in order to make the job worthwhile. So sometimes they acted as land surveyors, they would verify the accuracy of scales, but they would also get paid directly by the merchants they were protecting. And so as a general rule, these constables were really just hired muscle for the business leaders in these communities. And they would be paid by the people, you know, they weren't being paid by the state to enforce justice. They were being paid by people with money to enforce debts to

punish theft and to even intimidate rival business owners, right? Like that. Goons. Yeah. And obviously, as you caught by calling them hired goons, this was not seen as an honorable job. People didn't really want to be a constable, right? Like there was no blue lives like back the blue. Yeah. So historian Gary Potter notes that constables and night watch officers quote didn't want to wear badges because these guys had bad reputations to begin with and they didn't want to be identified as people that other people didn't like. So there was a strong resistance with early law enforcement of being identified as law enforcement because nobody liked you. Now, some towns in colonial North America made service in the watch compulsory. Rich people

tended to pay poor people to take their shifts for them. And Potter notes that these substitutes were usually quote a criminal or a community thug. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's again, it all tracks. Yeah, that's scans. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's all scans. So in 1829, back over in England, Sir Robert Peel, who was the home secretary of England, introduced the bill for improving the police in and in and near the metropolis. Now, the goal of this was to take the airsat system of watchmen and the like and formalize them into a real police force. And the London metropolitan police are generally recognized to be the very first modern police department in history. And Peel, he's an interesting guy. He felt that the job of police should be to prevent crime

rather than to punish it because that's kind of what, you know, all these constables, something got stolen. You like you'd get paid to go like fuck up the person who stole it, right? But like they weren't really preventing crime. So Peel was like, what if we tried to stop crimes? And he felt the best way to achieve that goal was with regular visible patrols of officers from a formal centralized department with uniforms and ranks and a clear physical headquarters so that people like new, those aren't just dudes, like those are the police and they're like a part of the state. Now, Peel felt that it was critical that only calm, even tempered citizens should be police officers. He felt they needed again. Yeah. What a thought. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That one didn't really spread. I don't know much about the London police, but it didn't make it across the pond. It just, there's a few things they threw out the bay with the bathwater in this situation. I get it. You didn't want to have a, you didn't want to have a king anymore. You know, you didn't like the tea. I get it. But like maybe having a calm police force wasn't a bad idea. You took part of the Magna Carta. You was like, yo, this, that this kind of seems like a good idea. Maybe y'all should have taken that one too. Yeah. And I did recently watch, like again, the London police have done a lot of messed up stuff too, even with some of the recent protests, but I did watch that when they threw the statue of that slaveholder into the

bay in Bristol, into the channel, I watched an interview with like the local constable or whatever he was like the local police chief type guy in Bristol because he was being asked by the news like why he didn't stop it. And his answer was basically like, well, you know, I'm a cop. So obviously I'm not okay with property destruction, but we had a choice to like, like our choice was to either let it happen or like basically fuck up people to protect the statue. And I felt like that would be bad for community trust in the police. See, that's pretty reasonable attitude. That's thinking on your feet, man. Like you feel me like, yeah. And he's like, what do I care about the statue? Yeah. So yeah, Peel had some other ideas too. Again, he felt that

like police needed uniforms with badges that had visible display numbers. So he was the idea like police should have badge numbers that you can identify if you're encounter a police officer, you can identify them. He also felt that police should not carry firearms. And again, that's like still kind of broadly applied in a lot of, you know, English policing. Now some of Peel's ideas quickly spread, obviously not the thing. Well, we'll talk about that again in part two. American police didn't initially have guns. In 1838, though, the city of Boston became the first U.S. city to establish a modern police force. Now the creation of the Boston police, which we'll talk about a bit more in our next episode, was driven by largely a capitalist necessity to protect the

property of big business. Boston merchants had been paying constables and the like to protect their goods for years. And they pushed for the establishment of a formal police force in order to shift the burden of paying for this onto the public, arguing that such a force would be for the collective good. So now we the merchants still get our stuff protected, but we don't have to pay everywhere. Or we, you know, we pay a little bit, but we pay a lot less because everybody's paying for these guys to protect our stuff. Yeah. So, so that's interesting. Now we'll return to these Northern police. And again, our second episode is going to cover more that because, you know, while the Boston police are the first modern department in history, the roots of many U.S.

police departments go back much further than 1838. And I think a lot of folks have heard, you know, through social media or whatever in the last couple of weeks as we've gone through this uprising, the idea that American police started out with slave patrols. And that's what we're going to talk about now. And that's partly accurate. It's not fair to say that. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly

a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person

to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All US police started as slave patrols because obviously in the north

they didn't have slave patrols really. It was a different route in the north, but in the American South policing absolutely did grow out of slave patrols. And you can draw a line between the two because obviously the first police departments in the north come out of a desire from people with money and property and shops to protect their property. And in the American South, policing also grew out of a desire for people with money to protect their property, but that property was enslaved by human beings. You know who doesn't establish slave patrols? Well, I don't know, man. I don't know, man. I think you never know, bro. You never know, yeah. I never know, man. Yeah, you know who historically might have tried to establish police departments

to protect? This is, I'm not doing great with this. Hey, you know who? No, I got none either, man. I'm sorry. We're going to roll ads now. You can just simply go fuck the police. It's an odd break. Boom. There it is. There we go. This podcast is brought to you by AT&T Fiber. Okay, what do you call an AT&T wireless customer who also has redonkulously fast internet? Someone who prefers to burn through an entire season of their favorite show in one sitting. Someone who's quick. Quick to suggest the video group chat while streaming a movie in 8K in the background like it's no big deal just because she can. Someone who feigns sympathy to stories of slow internet woes. Well, they're gagillionaires. Those who have AT&T fiber with hypergig speeds.

You see, gagillionaires coast through life in the internet's fast lane because they're powered by the confidence that their fast internet has their back. As an existing AT&T wireless customer, you can get an exclusive offer on the internet that upgrades everything. So start living like a gagillionaire. Get AT&T fiber now with hypergig speeds. Learn more at atc.com slash fiber offer. Limited availability in select areas. AK Stream requires compatible device. Restrictions apply. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast How Men Think. And that's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone. Get an inside look at what goes on in the mind of men from the men themselves. It's real talk, straight from the source.

The How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative, and probably a bit scary at times because we're literally going inside the minds of men. As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise. When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions. No sugar coating, no mind games, and absolutely no mansplaining. Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The first slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704, 126 years before

Boston got its police force. We're not even North or South Carolina yet. They hadn't gotten that far, but they knew they wanted Carolinas. We were clear on that, and they were clear that they wanted slave patrols in those Carolinas. First I was going to go old Carolina, but I was like, that's probably not going to land as well as sweet Carolina. Sweet Carolina. I think you read the room, right? Yeah. So slave patrols had three jobs, to chase down, apprehend, and return escaped slaves to their owners, and to discipline slave laborers via violence if they broke plantation rules, and to act as an organized and constant form of state-endorsed terror in order to stop American slaves from revolting. Now white Southerners lived in pretty much constant fear of slave

uprisings. The Haitian Revolution, which started in 1791, and again is very complicated, the Revolution's podcast by I think Mike Duncan is named as a great job of breaking this down, but the end result of it is that black and slave people rose up and murdered many of their masters, and they also, to make this very complicated, a lot of their masters were also colored peoples, a very complicated rebellion. Yeah, it's twisted. It's really twisted. This supremacy just really scrambles your brain, man. Yeah, it sure does. A side note about Haitians, did you know that that's where the word zombie came from? I do, yeah. It's a neat story. It's a neat story. It came from a zombie. Yeah, and it is, yeah, there's kind of like, I'm sorry, Sophie, it's history. I'm just hoping he doesn't

sing the song. She knows I'm going to start singing the cranberry song, zombie, and I'm not. Oh, that's what that was. That's what that was. Sophie got triggered, y'all. I was like, he's going to sing to me again, please. Oh, okay. It is kind of neat, I don't know, neat may be the wrong word, but I do think like you can, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems like you might be able to draw kind of a line and sort of the impetus behind or like why kind of these, like where the zombie sort of myth came from in Haitian culture and it's like roots to like the enslavement of black bodies and like kind of what the, like, what was kind of depicted in Get Out. Like, I, yeah, it is. There's a lot of ties to that, too, where you're just like, you're a shell of who you are. So,

they were like, they look like they're working, but they look like there's no life behind their eyes. And it's like, well, fool, duh, go say it. Of course there's not. Like, is there anything more hopeless than where I am right now? You know? Yeah. And it was, you know, what scared white people so much about the Haitian Revolution is that it kind of proved that like, oh, no, that light is still in there. Like you can beat them down pretty bad, but like it never goes away. And like, if we're not careful, that'll happen here and they'll kill us all. Yeah. And, you know, unfortunately, the Haitian Revolution remains the only successful slave revolt in Western history. I think maybe the only, the most, definitely the most successful slave rebellion anywhere in history, really,

because like, at least based on like the, yeah, as far as like shadow slavery and like the transatlantic slave trade, that's the only one that worked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a, I mean, it's good that it worked. It's a bummer it didn't work elsewhere. Yeah. But the memory of this one successful uprising was really lodged deep in the psyche of white Southerners and it scared the shit out of them. Yeah. And you can, you can hear echoes of that in the slave patroller's oath from North Carolina in 1828. And I'm going to read that now. Well, wait, let me take a deep breath before you do it. Yeah. Okay, go for it. Yeah. I, patroller's name, do swear that I will as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district faithfully and

as privately as I can discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs to the best of my power. So help me God. So again, what they're looking for here, they're trying to stop a rebellion. So searching for weaponry is kind of like one aspect of how they did this. But really, the thing they did the most was beat the ever living shit out of slaves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, in most of the South, working in these slave patrols was an obligation for white men, similar to compulsory military service. And in most of the slave states, it was kind of broadly mixed between rich people and poor people. So like a lot of slave patrollers didn't actually own slaves because they were poor white dudes. But it was kind of seen as a

broad duty for white people to be in the slave patrols for white men to kind of rotate through. Now rich people could in some places like basically pay a fine in order to not volunteer in the slave patrol. And it was also not uncommon for like wealthy white dudes and who are ironically the folks who own the most slaves to pay to have poor white men take their place. South Carolina was unique in allowing white women to be called up for service in slave patrol. So that's woke. Like, right? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? You pick your, you pick your oppression and you're just like, this is the one I'm going to fight for. You know, it's like cheering when the CIA puts a woman in charge. It's like, hey, you guys got one way. Yeah. I always say that like, I always

say, you know, obviously reading the room, like, I don't have to tell you all this, but like just the difference between white people and whiteness, you know, is like, it's a, it's a, it's a thing. Whiteness is it's a, it's a thing. It's itself this, it's booked in, you know, cooked in a white supremacy. And from, from my vantage point, it's like, just how detrimental that is to the psychology of white people also, you know what I'm saying? Like how, yeah, like you just, this rich dude hires this poor dude, right? So now the poor dude feel like, oh, I'm a little more important now. You know what I'm saying? But like fam, you, he don't, that man don't respect you. That man don't love you. I will make you think, he don't, like you want, you us, you one of us fool. You know what I'm

saying? He's throwing a chump change to do a shit job. That he thinks he better. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to oppress you so you can turn around and oppress somebody else because the reality is I'm better than you. Yeah. It's just like, like it scrambles. It just, it just, it's turned your brain to a pretzel. Just, just does. Yeah. I'm not a, not a fan. I'm going to be on record about that. Taking a bold stance. Yes. And I am a fan of you too. I, the band and the two people I'm looking at, I am a fan of y'all. All right. Anyway. So, um, so yeah, South Carolina let, let ladies be in the slave patrols. And I, I'm not sure if they ever actually really did serve in them, because they kind of, they had the option to pick a male from their family to go in as a substitute.

So I do think that happened more often. There may have been someone who rode with us. I can't tell you. Um, but yeah, in, you know, in some states they were kind of more of like an AirSat sort of force that was kind of cobbled together. In some states they were a professional paid institution that was like really kind of formalized. Um, in some states their membership was cold from local militias. So, you know, they were, they were different. They weren't all like, they weren't a, a uniform thing, but kind of the way they worked over the decades that slavery was, you know, a factor in the South, um, the way they worked kind of did become formalized. Now, historian Sally Hayden's book slave patrols is probably the most comprehensive history yet

written about these, the organizations, whatever you want to call them. She argues that in most cases slave patrols consisted of members of all social classes. White people were more or less unified in their obligation to suppress the black population and thus guarantee white supremacy. One piece of evidence Hayden, uh, or Haddon, sorry, um, sites to support this is an 1845 letter from a former South Carolina governor to a visiting English abolitionist. Quote, with us every citizen is concerned in the maintenance of order and in promoting honesty and industry among those of the lowest class who are our slaves and our habitual vigilance render standing armies, whether of soldiers or policemen entirely unnecessary, small guards in our cities and occasional patrols in

the country ensure us a repose and security known nowhere else. What? Yeah, that's how this, that's how this governor felt. Um, or at least that's what he wanted. And again, he's talking to an abolitionist from England here. So this is kind of the propaganda spin of the slave patrols. We don't have to have an army or police because our only danger is from these black people. Right? Like that's what he's saying. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Interesting. It's a brain pretzel, man. Yeah, it sure is. Yeah. Yeah. So again, in all states, slave patrols did the same basic work, which included enforcing the curfew that slaves lived under checking, which is talking about curfews. Yeah, curfew. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, checking traveling slaves for permission passes,

breaking up unlawful assemblies of slaves, and of course, searching for weapons. Yeah. Just okay. Yeah. I'm gonna need you to, I'm gonna need you to define your terms here, you know, overseer, like what do you mean by unlawful gathering? Yeah. This ain't my house. This ain't my land. I'm not even my own. Tell me what, I mean, what do you get? Where do you want us to stand? Where do you want us to stand so that you don't feel scared? Yeah, that really is what it like comes down to like, where, where do we, what, what can we do to not scare you? Do you want us to just like turn off after we're done farming? Yeah. Yeah. Then if that's the case, you should have just hired animals. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah. That's how they felt. Yeah.

Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So yeah. Historian Sally Hayden writes in her book, slave patrols, quote, the history of police work in the South grows out of this early fascination by white patrollers with what African-American slaves were doing. Most law enforcement was by definition, white patrolmen watching, catching or beating black slaves. And I do find that really interesting, because that's a through line right up to today. This fascination never stopped. Yeah. Never stopped, guys. Yeah. Yeah. And I like the way she describes it, this fascination with what African-Americans were doing, right? Like, that's what the, like the origin of policing in the South. John, have you heard of the, have you heard of the phrase like, it's in, it's in like feminism

also, but the phrase, the male gaze? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So like, in the same thing, in like black activism spaces, where it's like the white gaze. Yeah. It's just like, what are you looking at all the damn time? Like, good Lord, just make something up yourself. Like, why, like just, can you go do something? Like, you know, I think you said in one of your, one of the episodes, because I am an actual fan listeners, I listened to the show, like, that you were just like, if we could just give just like, white kids some cosplay, that's like, you're allowed to just like, shoot things into an open space. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, then maybe you wouldn't just be so worried about like, what I'm doing right now, you know?

Yeah. Like, that's, that's, I, I do think warrida, which is, you know, our plan to wall off Florida and turn into a free fire zone for just once a war. Yeah. As long as we like cover like Miami. Yeah. Just, can we keep Miami? Yeah, we can protect Miami. Yeah, we can protect Miami. Yeah. We have to protect Orlando. But we have to protect Orlando real quick, so that I can watch the NBA playoff. All right. Well, we're, we're rapidly chiseling away at war. This is not, it's not as fun, man. Yeah. Orlando's too far inland. Yeah. We'll find a war state. We, you know, we'll figure it out. Maybe the Panhandle. Can we go like Tallahassee? Oh, the Texas Panhandle. Yeah. Nobody likes that. Yeah. Nobody likes it. Turn Abilene into a free fire zone. Why is Abilene

a city anyway? We don't need it. It should not be a city here. Yes. Yeah. I had apologize to the Abilene listeners, but there's no one listening from Abilene. Four of you, you all left. You're in Dallas now. Could you realize Abilene shouldn't exist? Yeah. Abilene, the place where you will absolutely get pulled over if you drop through, just because there's nothing else for the cops to do. There's nothing else to do. Abilene, where as soon as you're 18, we'll see you later. Yeah. Yeah. Get out of there. Just you're leaving. Yeah. So the violence meted out by slave patrols was neither random nor disorganized. Slave patrollers had the right to detain, interrogate, and search slave quarters. They were allowed to seize property at will, which was, you could seize kind of an early

form of civil asset forfeiture. Yeah. They also had the right to punish black people on the spot for infractions of slave laws. Now, physical punishment could be dealt out via firearms, but was usually dealt out by what were called either Negro whips or Negro dogs. And I probably don't need to explain what Negro dogs were, but they're large bloodhounds that patrollers use both to track down slaves and to horribly maim them. Yeah. And that is the term that historians use for these, is Negro dogs, because that's what they were called by. Yeah. So we're talking mostly about slave patrols. And there's a lot of other areas I could get into detail, and I just don't have the time to, but I should note here that slave patrols were

not entirely the first thing kind of like slave patrols to exist in the United States. Even before slavery was really common in the United States, US settlers in New England appointed Indian constables whose job was to police Native Americans, often by violent terror. And it's worth noting that the St. Louis police, who we'll be talking about a bit at the end here, were formed both as a slave patrol and as a patrol to defend white people against Native Americans. So that is a big factor in a lot of this, too. You know, some of these areas, the Native populations kind of had gotten exterminated or pushed out by the time things formalized. But in a number of particularly more, you know, quote unquote, frontiery places, slave

patrols also did a lot of violence against Native Americans. And that is an important aspect of this. And even in the North where slave patrols weren't a thing, there were, you know, groups of vigilantes, well, not quite vigilantes, because they were sort of part of the government, whose job was to like, you know, do violence to Native people. Yeah. So that is a factor in all this as well. So yeah, if we want to be perfectly accurate, the case is less as it's made on Twitter that US police started as slave patrols, and more that US police started as a series of armed groups whose central purpose was to protect white people from non white people via violence. That would be, yeah. That gets your critical race theory juices going.

Intersectionality of oppression from the police. Like, look, they coming for you too. That's always been my answer. Look, you chilling, they coming for you too. I hope you know. So the institution of slave patrols evolved and formalized over time. And for a look at how that worked, I think it'll be used for us to zoom in on the case of my home state, Missouri. Now, Missouri entered the Union in 1821 as a slave state and racism was obviously baked into the new polity from the very beginning. In 1825, the new state passed a law banning any, quote, free Negro or mulatto from coming into the state under any pretext whatsoever. Which Oregon had a pretty similar but partial rule after the Civil War. So like, yeah,

idea of how racist Oregon started out as 1825 is also the year that Missouri established its very first slave patrols. And I'm going to quote now from a paper by Morehouse College professor Larry Sprule, quote, by 1845, these patrols had permission to administer from 10 to 30 lashes to slaves found strolling about from one plantation to another without pass from his master, mistress or overseer or strolling about. Yeah, you can't go for no walk. What's wrong with you? And you could just as what you just said, it's like, oh, no, I don't have a like I'm free. I don't have a master. Yeah. Well, you ain't got no letter from your master. No, sir, you're not listening to me. I don't have a master. You're breaking the law. Well, then you don't

belong in this state. Yep. All right, I guess. Yeah. So Missouri slave patrols worked at least 12 hours a month. But also, you know, some people worked a lot more and members received about 25 cents per hour. Now, I should note here that the patrols weren't just randomly accosting individual slaves, enslaved humans in the United States resisted their situation in a variety of ways. And so there were often like, you know, minor little uprisings that slave patrols were like working to put down. So slaves would often take crops and livestock from from their masters, they would burn fields and even plantation houses, they would poison their masters and they would attempt uprisings. And so like the Spartan Kryptea, most of the work of slave patrols was

broadly what we would call counterinsurgency today. In many rural counties in Missouri, enslaved black persons were the majority of people and whites were well aware that they had, you know, kind of a tiger by the tail. Sprule continues, quote, Southern whites developed a collective conscience and political consensus to tightly control blacks within their midst. Slave policing demanded accountability for every captive's whereabouts. A missing slave was cause for grave concern often causing panic. Fear of insurrection made unauthorized blacks on roads or in the public square hazardous. Racial features made blacks visible, suspect and vulnerable to slave patrols looking to catch a inward out of his place without a pass. Just as blackness was

the stigmatized identification of bondsmen, it also singled them out as suspects and criminals. An enslaved Africans phenotype marked them as a habitual dangerous class requiring relentless supervision and policing to guarantee their submission. Yeah, that also sounds familiar. Yeah, that sounds familiar. And we'll be talking the term dangerous class is used constantly by historians who study policing in the United States. That is, we will be talking a lot about the idea of dangerous classes. Yeah. It's an important concept. You don't realize like how that like that, that just poisonous stain, like just that, that, that weird DNA strand just like stayed with us to the point to where, you know, you're, I know you're going to get to it later,

but like, you know, black men, black boys being treated like adults when they're kids, because you already think we're more dangerous. So your first gun, I was, first time I caught a gun on me, I was 14. And I was like, I didn't grow no facial hair. I still had a squeaky voice. It just was terrifying. He was talking to me like I was some hard and criminal. And I'm like, dog, I'm a freshman. I'm a freshman in high school. Like, I'm scared that I'm like, my mom's going to be pissed because I'm home late. That's what I'm scared about. My mom's going to be pissed that I supposed to be home at 345. I'm going to get home at 415. She's going to be like, where the hell are you? You know what I'm saying? So like, I'm,

I'm, and you're talking to me like, I know, like, I don't even know the words he's saying is because you already see us already as dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, this is, this is like how that kind of stops and evolves and how that ball gets rolling to the boulder it is today. Yeah. Yeah. So for kind of another, another look at how people saw the slave patrols in that time, I want to go to a guy named Basil Hall. He was a 19th century English traveler and author. He visited the American South in 1829 and he wound up in Richmond, Virginia. His recollection of how slave patrols were explained to him gives us another insight into how white people talked about this institution to other white people, which I think is compelling.

Quote, in walking round, my eyes were struck with the unusual sight of a sentinel marching with his musket. My companion said, and his companion is a local American southerner, a white southerner, obviously, it is necessary to have a small guard always under arms. It is the consequence of the nature of our colored population, but it is done more as a preventative check than anything else. It keeps all thoughts of insurrection out of the heads of the slaves, and so gives confidence to those persons amongst us who may be timorous. But in reality, there is no cause for alarm. The blacks have become more and more sensible every day of their want of power. After further inquiry, Hall noted, I learned that there was in all these places in towns a vigorous and active police whose

rule is that no Negro, for example, is allowed to be out of doors after sunset without a written pass from his master explaining the nature of his errand. If during his absence from home, he be found wandering from the proper line of his message, he is speedily taken up and corrected accordingly. So that's a lot of that's interesting, like the idea that like the police are here not just to keep keep black people in line, but so that frightened white people don't get scared of black people. That's an interesting part to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good that. Yeah, that layer. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. We're here for Karen's too. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Hey, Karen, you can always call us. You can always call the cops here. Yeah. That's exactly what's

going on here. So slave patrols were generally limited to pursuing escaped slaves within their own counties. When a slave or a group of slaves was fortunate enough to be able to move further away from wherever they were being held, bounty hunters like slave bounty hunters generally took on the job of attempting to track these slaves down. And these men were allowed to cross state lines. And their work was supported by the Fugitive Slave Act, which was passed in 1850 as part of a compromise to try and avoid a civil war. The law mandated that all escaped slaves if captured be returned to their masters, even if those slaves had escaped to a free state. Abolitionists called this the bloodhound bill after the dogs that bounty hunters and slave patrolers used to track

down slaves. Solomon Northrop, author of the memoir 12 Years a Slave, gave one account of what it was like to watch patrollers with dogs hunt down an enslaved black person. In this case, it was not even an escaped slave, but merely an individual who had broken his curfew. Quote, one slave fled before one of these companies thinking he could reach his cabin before they could overtake him. But one of their dogs, a great ravenous hound, gripped him by the leg and held him fast. The patrollers whipped him severely. I want to be careful. I don't want to draw, because it does a disservice to the horrific suffering of black people in this period of time. And today, what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's

start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start

a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. To draw like too many direct comparisons to some of the stuff happening now. But it's not, I don't think we can go without entirely mentioning it that like probably a lot of people listening right now had violence done to them by police recently for breaking curfew.

Like that is interesting to me. Like the obsession with curfew is a through line, right? If you're out when you're not allowed to, we get to fuck you up. Yeah, and it's funny. Like I was talking with some of my friends, my wife, even my daughter. My daughter's old enough now to go to protest with us and kind of do her own thing. And just us at this point being like, okay, dude, are you serious? Like at California, we just kept getting the alerts like four o'clock, five o'clock, six o'clock.

It just kept, you kept getting the amber alerts of the thing. And it's like, dude, okay, bro, get it together. All right. And just talk to us later. But it's kind of like we were kind of like, is this a joke, man? Like, okay, so it's a thousand dollar fine. Okay, throw me in the patty wagon. Yeah.

It's a thousand dollar fine. It's fine. You know what I'm saying? Maybe you're going to rough me up a little bit, but I'm black. I'm from Los Angeles. You've been roughing me up my whole life. You know what I'm saying? So for us, we were kind of like, it's kind of, it's kind of laughable.

And then you go back to like, no, it wasn't always laughable. Yeah. You know, like this was terror. Yeah. This was absolutely terror. And I think they would have, it's interesting that it is talked about slave patrols as like a counterinsurgency, but like the way they countered the insurgency was by being terrorists. It was like these guys were terrorists.

Yeah. And that's the first police departments in a lot of ways. Like it's a gentleman. Yeah. Yeah. So Spruitt's article, which we've been quoting from includes a number of other firsthand accounts by enslaved persons of the use of these, these dogs, you know, these blood hounds, Negro dogs.

Most of these accounts were taken down during the Great Depression, which is one of the coolest things they did during the New Deal is the FDR administration sent a bunch of people out to interview former slaves who are at that point quite old. But that's where we get a lot of our, a lot of our like kind of formal stories of what it was like to be an enslaved person this period. So thank you, the New Deal for that particular thing was a good call. So one of these people who was interviewed noted, quote, in every district they had about 12 men they call patrollers.

They write up and down and round looking for inwards without passes. When slaves run away, they always put the blood hounds on the tracks. They had the dogs trained to keep their teeth out of you till they hold them up to bring you down. Then the dogs would go at your throat and they tear you to pieces too. After a slave was caught, he was brung home and put in chains. Yeah. So we also have recollections of slave patrol members of their use of dogs.

One of these guys and who was a slave patroller in Louisiana in 1857, described his method of work thusly, quote, If I can catch a cussed runaway in word without killing him, very good. Though I generally let the hounds punish him a little and sometimes give him a load of squirrel shot, which is like a light shotgun load. If mild measures like these do not suffice, I use harsher punishment. The moment the hounds come close, they utter a hideous and mournful howl. Heaven pity the poor.

And then he uses the inward again. So yeah, not a not a good dude. No, I hope he didn't make it out of that civil war. Yeah, that'd be nice with you. Yeah, I hope that guy got Gettysburg. It's a bird. Yeah, I hope he met Sherman or Grant or someone. Yeah, something.

I'm about to get his Berg this transition. Yeah, let's get these Berg these ads like pickets. I don't know. Fuck it. Just run the ass. I call the union hall. I say it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade over. We found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King.

One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys?

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And we're talking about the use of dogs to enforce a regime based in terrorism, otherwise known as the American South. Kind of what it was, guys. So the horrible wounds left by these dogs fulfilled a dual purpose. They served as a reminder of white supremacy, and as an easy way to identify troublesome slaves,

because obviously there are a ton of slaves with horrible dog scars. And other black people seeing those scars, both would be like white people have the power, because look at how badly all these people got fucked up. And also it was a way for the white people to see that guy's trouble. That was your arrest record,

was the dog scars on your face. He's the red sports car. That's what the teachers tell you. You know, you're kind of a red sports car kid. The cops are going to look for you, because I expect you to be fast. Thanks, Miss Williams. Thank you.

It's pretty obscure, deep cut. But, like, that's bad. But still, anyway. No, nobody tells white kids stuff like that. At least I didn't fucking hear anything like that. You didn't hear the red car vet, or the red sports car story? I mean, I got told, as a young adult,

I got told not to buy a red car, because the police cite them for speeding more often. But like, that was my thing, yeah. Well, that's, there it is. Yeah, yeah. It is weird that we tell people in general, like, don't stand out, or the, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, B leaders don't stand out.

What? Yeah. So, by the onset of the Civil War, Bloodhounds had grown to become the single most reliable tool of oppression in the arsenal of southern whites. Like, the dogs in particular, were like the way in which more than any other tool,

white people, like, I think even, the lash was used more as like a punishment, but like, in terms of a tool of actual oppression, like, the dogs were really like the fucking thing. And when the Civil War started, the organized and militant men of the slave patrols were all too happy to turn their counterinsurgency skills to use in a real war.

One Union field officer, scouting through rebel lands in 1862, reported hearing the constant barking of hounds, which would have been turned towards a new use searching for Union infiltrators. This officer described dogs as the detective officers of slavery's police. Confederate generals also deployed Bloodhounds

on the front line. Black Union soldiers were considered fugitive slaves in arms, and it was seen as only logical that these Negro dogs could be used to break their will and send them fleeing from battle. You know, these Southern generals were like, they're so scared of these dogs,

if we use them against these new Black military units, it'll make them all run away, right? Like, clearly, these guys won't be able to handle, you know, standing up to dogs in combat. This was one of many misconceptions that the Zell had. About how things were gonna go in that war. On October 23rd, 1862, the Battle of Pocotaligo Bridge marked the first time Black soldiers came face-to-face

with the Negro dogs of slave patrols in open combat. The Black soldiers were the men of the 1st South Carolina Colored Regiment, and their field report stated that, the men met these dogs with bayonets, killed four or five of their old tormentors with great relish. And I'm not normally a killing dogs person,

but in this case, it's a good story. No, yeah, yeah. And I feel like knowing a little bit of your backstory, you'd be surprised when a person is fighting for their life, the amount of bravery and adrenaline that you can muster up when you're like, I'm not dying today. It's not happening today.

You know, so yeah, when you don't under... If you want to estimate that, and you just think this dog's gonna stop these men, like, you think I'm worried about that little dog right now? Nah, bro. I'm not going back. We're not going back. We got guns now.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So fighting between Confederate units with slavehounds and Black Union units continued throughout the war. In 1864, one Black soldier wrote a letter back to his wife, depicting one such batter. He actually wrote her a poem,

and it's a pretty cool poem, so I'm gonna read that now. We met the bloodhounds at the bridge. They ran with all their might. It was a glorious sight. But we ran our bayonets through their backs. We shot them with the gun. It was all over with the dogs,

and it was most glorious fun. In former days, those brutes were used to hunt the flying slave. They tracked them through their dismal swamps and little quarter gave. But when they tried the game of war, we knocked them on the head. We shot them quick and ran them through

until every hound was dead. Woo! Yes, good poem. Bars. Bars. Yeah. So, so obviously, and I'm spoilers here to the listeners

who have not caught up to U.S. history past like 1864, the Confederacy didn't win the war. I don't know if you, despite the amount of flags that are flying and still in our country, y'all lost. I'll tell you, one of the,

I got to watch from a distance, someone in my neighborhood in Portland have a real like, like growth moment. So there's this, you know, the general Lee, the car from the beach of hazard that was like the Confederate flag on the hood.

I had a little Hot Wheels one. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. There was a guy who lives not far from me, who has like a, who has that car, like a perfect replica of the general Lee.

And it had the Confederate flag on it. And for the first few months I lived there, I would see him driving through the streets with his big Confederate flag on his general Lee. And about two, three months ago, I saw him driving his car, but he painted over the Confederate flag and it was just orange.

Oh. And I was like, oh, you had a, you had a, You figured it out. Yeah. You had a little moment. Good for you.

Yeah. You grew a bit. Oh, this is fucked up. Yes. See, that's what I mean by the Northwest, specifically important as a tale of two cities, because I'm like, there's this just bastion of like,

left progressive, like freedom fighting, yawtoin, like, you know, tiger claw, damn, like hard, hard ciders at the police, you know what I'm saying? And then,

and then there's the guy with the, and you, right in my life, my life. It's a complicated place. Yes. No. And then there's the guy

with the Robert E. Lee, with the, with the general league card. Like it's just, it's two cities in one place. Some of the greatest coffee in the world. Oh, great coffee. Quote me.

Solid beer. Yeah. Quote me. Some of the most amazing beer. And then there's like, and then there's Salem. And you open their Salem. What the hell happened?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, the Confederacy lost the war. And by 1865,

both the dream of Southern independence and slavery were dead. White supremacy though, did not die. White people in the former Confederate states wasted no time in turning the institutions of the slave patrols into formal police departments.

In 1865, the editor of the Lynchburg, Virginia noted, which was the newspaper, noted that quote, stringent police regulations may be necessary to keep freedmen from overburdening the towns

and depleting the agricultural regions of labor. The civil authority should also be fully empowered to protect the community from this new imposition. The magistrates and municipal officers everywhere should be permitted to hold a rod in terrarium over these wandering idle creatures.

Nothing short of the most efficient police system will prevent strolling, vagrancy, theft, and other destruction of our industrial system. So, yeah, that's pretty clear. That's pretty great. It's the,

it's the like, it's the moment like, so the Chappelle show years ago had a skit where he depicted the day like, the postman comes with the letter that the slaves are free.

Right? And like, it's one of the greatest skits and they're just, and he's about to whip this, whip this guy, whip this guy, whip this guy,

then the postman walks up and he goes, well, apparently, apparently you guys are free. And he just starts like looking around at all the other slaves around him and they're like, he's like,

uh, hey, sorry about that a second ago, man. You know, just like, so what do you do? Like what exactly? So they're like,

uh, we bet it, you know, we bet it, we better get us some protection because those last hundred years were kind of shit to them. You know? Yeah.

Oh shit. What if they treat us even a little bit as bad as we treated them? A little bit as bad. Yeah. In her book, Slave Patrols,

Hayden notes, quote, policemen in southern towns continued to carry out those aspects of urban slave patrolling that seemed race neutral, but in reality, were applied selectively.

Police saw that nightly curfews and vagrancy laws kept blacks off city streets, just as patrollers had done in colonial and antebellum times. In the post-war south, police were seen as the single most important method of maintaining a system of,

in the words of one prominent Virginia clergyman, liberty for the white man, slavery for the inward, so long as the white man is able to hold him. Exactly. Now in the textbook policing,

by North Dakota state's Carrow Archbold, published by Sage Press, that textbook gives a rundown of how slave patrollers transitioned into policing freed blacks in the post-war period,

and I'm going to quote from that next. During early reconstruction, several groups merged with what was formerly known as slave patrols to maintain order over African-American citizens. Groups such as the Federal Military,

the State Militia, and the Ku Klux Klan took over the responsibilities of earlier slave patrols and were known to be even more violent than their predecessors. Over time, these groups began to resemble

and operate similar to some of the newly established police departments in the United States. In fact, David Barlow and Melissa Barlow note that by 1837, the Charleston Police Department

had 100 officers, and the primary function of this organization was slave patrol. These officers regulated the movements of slaves in free blacks, checking documents,

enforcing slave codes, guarding against slave revolts, and catching runaway slaves. Scholars and historians assert that the transition from slave patrols to publicly funded police agencies was seamless

in the southern region of the United States. So they just took these slave patrols, the war's over, now your cops. That's literally how it went. Now, that's not every, obviously not every police department in the South because like a lot of cities and towns

that are in the South now and have police didn't exist back then. But like, for example, the St. Louis Police started as a slave patrol. The St. Louis Police Department that existed today began as a slave patrol. Yeah, yeah.

The current St. Louis Police have their origins as a slave patrol. So a number of the St. Louis Police Department's first officers were former bounty hunters and slave patrolers, and they brought to their new job their old tactics,

most specifically their old tactic of using dogs to torture and terrify black people. And here's where things get real, real, real angry making because the use of Negro dogs continues to this moment right now in present day St. Louis.

Oh my God. Yeah. Talk to me now. I said, talk to me now. I was just making a St. Louis show. So it's stomping the Air Force ones. In 2014, the murder of Michael Brown

by a Ferguson St. Louis police officer prompted an uprising by the city's black population. I think people are broadly familiar with this. And this was suppressed with extreme violence. But the whole affair forced the Department of Justice to conduct and publish an expansive report

on the Ferguson Police Department's behavior. This report concluded that, quote, the Ferguson Police Department engages in a pattern of deploying canines to bite individuals when the articulated facts do not justify the significant use of force, leaving serious puncture wounds

to nonviolent offenders, some of them children. Now, the report went on to note that Ferguson Police were allowed to sick dogs on suspects when any crime, not just a felony or violent crime, has been committed.

This permissiveness, combined with the absence of meaningful supervisory review and an apparent tendency to overstate the threat based on race, has resulted in avoidable dog bites to low-level offenders. And the DOJ report kind of uses a little bit of Weasel language

on this fact. But one of the things it revealed is that 100% of the people named by Ferguson police dogs were black. See, this, like, how, what am I trying to say right now? What gets under my skin in discussions of this

is that it sounds so preposterous that people say, we're alarmists. We're just making this stuff up. You know, that was a long time ago. It's all in your head. And you're like, so after a while,

you actually start thinking, you know, maybe I am crazy. Maybe it is in my head. And then you're just like, and then you look at your other black friends and you're like, am I tripping or did this happen? And they're like, no,

it kind of happened to me too. And then you're like, how about the other fucking side of the country? Did it happen to y'all too? And you're just like, yeah. So then when you, and then when the report comes out, you're just like, guys,

like, I'm telling you, I'm not crazy. I'm telling you, this is happening, you know? And I still got to convince you. And I'm like, what do you, what do you, what do you, what do you, what do you, what do you, what do you need? And it, it didn't convince, it 2015, this comes out.

And it's another, like, people seem more convinced now after everything that's happened. But like, it took like five years after this report came out. And there was really, you know, there was an uproar over the murder of Michael Brown, obviously.

But there was the fucking, the fact that, the fact that a police department formed out of a slave patrol that used dogs to maim black people in order to terrorize them was 200 years later, using dogs to maim only black people

in order to terrorize. The fact that that was happening, like, it was like, and then it was out of the zeitgeist. And then it was out of the zeitgeist. That's what I was gonna say. Then it's gone out of the zeitgeist. And it's, and that's the other thing that's so hard about like,

and I'm critiquing myself, period. I'm critiquing all of us, period, is like, when, when the cameras leave, like how hard it is to keep the energy up to say, look, listen, I know it was a high, it was a high, like, you know, high profile case, but it's not done. You know what I'm saying?

And now that it's back, okay, it's a year later, y'all forgot about my ground because you onto the next hashtag. But I'm like, no, seriously, we didn't make this up. Like, here's the evidence. Like, I'm telling you, that's what happened. And it's like, it's, you find yourself like,

just exhausted as to go like, I just, no matter how many receipts I give you. Yeah. Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of receipts, I do feel like I need to quote

from the New Yorker here in there. They did do a pretty good article kind of digging into the use of these dogs. So I do want to like credit them for that. They didn't, like, look away. They, you know, they put out an article, which isn't nothing. It's better than not an article.

Better than not. Yeah, right. Yes. Like, yeah. In one account, a dog was sent after an unarmed 16-year-old who was also tasered. The electric shock of that weapon partially paralyzes a person. If that were to happen while a dog was tearing

at your arms and legs, all you could do would be to watch in immobilized horror. Another case involves four police officers, including a canine handler, trapping an unarmed 14-year-old in an abandoned basement. The crime, trespassing. The Department of Justice report recounts what the boy says happened to him.

When he saw the dog at the top of the steps, he turned to run, but the dog quickly bit him on the ankle and then the thigh, causing him to fall to the floor. The dog was about to bite his face or neck, but instead got his left arm, which the boy had raised to protect himself. FPD officers struck him while he was on the ground,

one of them putting a boot on the side of his head. He recalled the officers laughing about the incident afterward. Uh, the boys in blue. The boys in blue. Yeah, the boys in blue, man. Yeah. You just, man, it's like, how many bad apples you need

before you start like checking the orchard? Like, what if the soil's bad? Like, how come nobody's like, you keep talking about these, yo tree keep producing bad fruit? Like, and you keep blaming, like, something wrong with your tree, man. Yeah, all these apples are just filled with piss.

Like, what happened? Why are all the apples pissing? Why are all the apples filled with piss? That's just one. Well, then why, Wolf is just, why are you putting it in a bucket? Why do we keep growing these apples? Why do you keep growing the damn apples then?

Maybe we get rid of the orchard. It's a bad orchard. I don't know. Like, it makes sense to me. Yeah. So again, the use of Ferguson police dogs made very little of a splash when it was revealed, even though again, 100% of the individuals

named by Ferguson police dogs were black, and 90% of individuals that the Ferguson police did violence to in general were black. Names of canine officers and their supervisors were not revealed in the report. That Department of Justice report on the Ferguson PD made 137 corrective recommendations on how the department could fix its violent behavior.

Only one of those reforms dealt with canine violence, suggesting that the police department require on-site supervisory approval before allowing a canine officer to maim people. It's like, you got to call a manager first. If it's cool, I bite this black guy. Okay. I want to have a dog tear at the flesh of this 14-year-old.

Is that cool? How's that? All right. Glad we put this requirement in. It did the paperwork. It's all good. So as of today, Ferguson police still use dogs to control suspects.

Most Ferguson officers are white, virtually all the people they arrest and detain are black. No Ferguson officer has yet been tried or fired for using police dogs to brutalize citizens. Professor Larry Spruill notes, quote, the officer's procedural avoidance of criminal liability for death and torture of black citizens was not dissimilar to slave patroller's

antebellum indemnity for similar violence. Yep. In his paper on Negro dogs and the Ferguson police, Professor Spruill cites two other academics, Williams and Murphy, who wrote a 1990 paper on the transition from slave patrols to police departments. Williams and Murphy noted, quote, the legal order sustained slavery, segregation,

and discrimination from most of our nation's history. And the fact that the police were bound to uphold that order set a pattern for police behavior and attitudes towards minority communities that have persisted until the present day. That pattern includes the idea that minorities have fewer civil rights, that the task of police is to keep them under control,

and that the police have little responsibility for protecting them from crime within their communities. Oh, God. There we go. Oh, my God. Yep. Maybe Portland can throw me one of those white claws. There was, I missed this rally,

but there was apparently a rally where some of the Antifa kids. Do you remember when there was that Pepsi ad with... Kendall Jenner. Kendall Jenner, where she hands a Pepsi to a cop like right after that ad, a bunch of those kids showed up at this... I think it was a May Day protest with crates of Pepsi

and just started shucking them at the cops. I love it. Yeah. Oh, my God, dude. You know what I give to the Antifa kids, man? They got senses of humor down there. Like, y'all funny. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Yeah, it's been interesting because there's all this talk of like, like Portland has like a big anti-fascist sort of activist community, but like with all the talk that there is from the president about Antifa at these protests, they've really taken a backseat.

Like they have not been driving the fucking bus here. I can tell you that much. And it's kind of obvious because I'm like in some ways, I feel like a lot of the anti-fascist dudes, like they got us, they have a style. There's like an aesthetic to what they do that like, and I know it's a weird way to say it, but I feel like I'd go, oh, yeah,

that's kind of their flavor. And I'm like, this ain't that. Yeah. This is just something else, you know? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, like a lot of them are. It's like when you see the, yeah, when you see like the graffiti that says like Black's rule,

I'm like, a Black man did not write that. No, they did not write that. That's ridiculous. Okay. The flip side of that was like in Portland on two Fridays ago, I think we had, you know, a crowd march to the justice center, and then people just started fucking it up, like breaking all the windows, they lit some fires, like,

and it was one of, it was very obvious, I think to everyone who knew the city, like, because this was like the day after the, the precinct in Minneapolis was burned, and I was like, yeah, they're gonna fuck that justice center up. It's going down. Yeah. And there was like, it was blamed a lot on like,

like white anarchist kids, like, yeah, there were definitely some of those folks doing it, but like, it was a pretty diverse crowd that fucked up the justice center. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not, yeah, it's, you know, life in history is not so compartmentalized that you could just be like, this happened, this happened, and that group of people

bought in sales did the thing. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of folks wanted to get into that justice center and run it around. I'm not gonna lie, yeah. So, Prop, that is episode one, and again, this is, you know, the slave patrol, a lot of, you know,

this, pretty much every episode is going to deal with racism, because it's kind of central to policing. But next episode, we're going to be talking about sort of policing more in the north, and kind of policing against, against people we consider white, but who at the time, the people who controlled the police might not necessarily have considered white. You know, that's a big part of this, yeah.

Oh, I can't wait for this one, because like, at some point, man, I just feel like, I know my work's going to call me to do a, some sort of deep dive in the construction of like pan-ethnic terms, like black or white, and what the hell that means. Like, you know, even, even hearing like, the, who was the Milo boy?

What was his name? Milo, yeah. Oh, Milo Unopolis. Yeah, whatever the hell his name is. Him talking about like, this, our country was made for the advancement of white men. And I'm like, no, I wasn't, because there was no such thing as white men

when y'all got here. And you, you ain't even, you didn't even want the Irish here. That's the northern part of the same island for crying out loud. So like, you looking at them, you don't think, it's still people in this world that don't think Italians are white. Like, I just, what the hell are you talking about?

You know what I'm saying? Like, so you don't even know what white means, you know? So I love what you're going to go to next, because just like, you have to remember, again, it's a construct. Like y'all made, y'all made that up. Yeah. So we'll talk about that in part two.

Yes. Prop, you want to plug some pluggables before we roll out? Man, yeah. So yeah, everything for me is PropHipHop.com. That's my at mention, just all of it, PropHipHop. Doing a fun thing on Fridays called Poor Agami Fridays, where I basically just make a, make a single cup of like,

pour over coffee with a buddy on Instagram. Sounds good right now, actually. And we feature like, yeah, we feature like a local roaster from wherever, like offer discounts. And like, and since this last, you know, uprising, we've been featuring like, coffee roasters, you know, owned by persons of color.

To just support, just support good coffee, you know what I'm saying? So that's kind of a fun thing. I'd plug on this one. Since I get to come back three times, I get to pick what I'm going to plug. You know what I'm saying? Oh yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. Yeah, man. Well, check that out. Check out Prop and his wonderful music on his YouTube channel. And well, Propaganda, people should know. If they look for Prop, they'll find something else. Propaganda. Yeah, also, you know what?

Actually, I would say, you know what? I'm glad you brought that up. So let me save all y'all the DMs you're going to give me. At some point, I done already answered the question you finish want a personal answer for in one of these videos or interviews. So like, so just, you know, check the YouTube. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. Uh, just, just, it's, it's probably there. We at, at some point, we've talked about it. So I'm just, just go ahead and put that out. All right, folks. Well, we will be back like fucking four more times, at least to talk about American police and where they came from. So I hope everybody enjoys this series.

And I hope folks pass it along to friends and family who might think that policing just needs a little bit of like, just gotta like, just gotta like get some schmutz off its face and we'll be back, we'll be fine. Like, we can't go back to it being good. It was always shit to rethink this thing. You know, and like, and I mean, I'm going to come back to this a bunch of times.

I know this episode got to be, I'm going to come back to this a bunch of times, but like, I hope people are hearing that like, almost, not almost, literally all of our institutions, we just made them up. Like they're made up, you know what I'm saying? At some point in time, we made, they don't exist in nature. Like we made them up. So if you have a bad idea in any other part of your life,

you stop doing the bad idea and you try to make a better one. Yeah, we can, we can have a society where like, if someone commits murder, there's somebody whose job it is to like, figure out who did that and like, make sure they don't get to keep doing murder. We, we can have that. We don't have, we can have that without having a dude who feels empowered to choke a man for nine minutes.

Thank you. We don't have to have both. You don't have to have both. You mean to tell me the thought has never crossed your mind that the person that takes care of this homeless guy for loitering, who's just by virtue of his existence is breaking it all and the same guy and the same tool needs to deal with the acts of murder or that story.

Like you, you mean to tell me that takes the same people? Yeah, like there's, there's so many fucking countries that have people who like make sure there aren't drunk drivers on the road and the people who do that job don't have guns and don't get to like throw people in prison and ruin their lives and search them for drugs and plant drugs on them. Like you, you don't, you can have people whose job is like,

yeah, we should make sure, you know, we should have some eyes on traffic. Cause like that's, that's a big thing. Like somebody should be like, yeah, let's keep an eye on that shit without the other stuff. Or legally go into a woman's house while she's sleeping and murder her. Yeah.

Maybe we don't need no knock raids at all for any reason. That's a bad idea. Like why, like who just keeps, who just holds on to bad ideas? Just like it's a bad idea. Like let's just think of another one. Yeah. Shame we can't change. Well, yeah, right.

For more bad ideas, come back on a, on Thursday. We'll, we'll talk about, um, talk more about cops. Yeah. All right. That's us for now. Goodbye. Behind the Police is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mama, what does the chicken say? Uh, dog, cat, giraffe. Giraffe, really? Giraffe, uh, giraffe. You're not going to get it all right. Just make sure you know the big stuff,

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Questions about the inflection points in their life, what they like least about themselves, and what relationship has defined love for them. This season, I'm coming back with new trailblazers, like blondie vocalist Debbie Harry. I did have a revelation. It was at CBGBs, as a matter of fact. I was waiting for the audience to give it to me, give it me.

Then I realized that I had to make them, I had to command them. Artist and creative juggernaut, Goldie. And I walk up to the mountain on a high clock, just being in that environment and seeing life and death in front of you, right in front of you. And I go up there and scream and cry and laugh, and I find that being the happiest. And many more.

Join me as we continue this exploration on season two of Many Questions, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow,

hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.